AirAsia cockpit voice recorder found – Indonesian officials

Divers in the Java Sea have retrieved the cockpit voice recorder from the crashed AirAsia

flight QZ8501, say officials.

The retrieval comes a day after the first piece of the so-called black box, the flight data

recorder, was also found and brought to shore.

The aircraft with 162 people on board disappeared between Surabaya in Indonesia and

Singapore on 28 December.

The two devices will help investigators understand more about what went wrong.

Forty-eight bodies have been recovered so far, but most of the victims are believed to still

be inside the fuselage.

SB Supriadi from Indonesia’s search and rescue agency told the BBC’s Indonesian service

the fuselage had been located by divers about 1.5km (0.9 miles) from where the tail

section was found last week.

He said there were no plans yet to go down and retrieve it.

Pilot conversations

The voice recorder was discovered close to where the flight data recorder was found on

Monday.

Navy divers found it under debris and not under a wing as initially thought, a military

official said on Indonesian television.

It was then handed to the Indonesian air crash investigation team.

“This is good news for investigators to reveal the cause of the plane crash,” said Tonny

Budiono, sea navigation director at the Transportation Ministry.

The BBC’s Karishma Vaswani said the device – which records all conversations between

the pilots – will be analysed by aviation experts.

The flight data recorder – holding information about the speed at which the plane was

travelling, its altitude and other technical information – is already in the capital.

Flight recorders are designed to survive a crash and being submerged in water. They

contain underwater locator beacons which emit so-called “pings” for at least 30 days.

These pings were detected by search vessels at the weekend but divers were prevented

from going down to find them by strong currents and high waves.